Phidias (part II)

And
here is an admirable thing! Even by the mouth of its comic poets who had,
however, been formed by the great works and fed by the myths of the past, this
race needed to proclaim its faith. Read in the "Peace" the moving,
religious saying of Aristophanes: "The exiling of Phidias brought on the
war. Pericles, who feared the same fate and who distrusted the bad character of
the Athenians, cast away peace. . . By Apollo, I was unaware that Phidias was
related to that goddess. . . Now I know why she is so beautiful." The
whole of anthropomorphic idealism is in that speech. The Greek makes his gods
in the image of man, and the god is beautiful, to the extent that man is lofty
in mind.

On this
simple soil, by this healthy race, religious naturalism was to reach its goal
of deifying the natural and moral laws as men and women. The poet came, and his
symbols gave resplendent visages to these deifications. What the Greek really
adored when he was matured and liberated was the accord between his mind and
the law. Whatever may have been said of it, anthropomorphism is the only
religion that science has left intact, for science is the law deduced from the
aspects of life by man, and only by him. Our conception of the world is the
only proof we can offer of its existence and of our own.

The
personified laws, the gods who have become real beings for the crowd, are not
tyrants, not even the creators of men—they are other men, more accomplished in
their virtue, more grandiose in their disorder. They have the faults and the
impulses of men, they carry the latter's wisdom and beauty to the degree where
these become fateful forces, they are the human ideal opposed by human
passions, the laws which it is our business—against the resistance of egoism
and of the elements of nature—to deduce from the world and to obey. Herakles
combats the accident, the thing that retards and opposes our progress toward
order. He enters the forests to beat the lions to death, he dries up swamps, he
cuts the throats of evil men and overpowers bulls. His hairy arms, his knees,
and his breast bleed from his struggle with the rocks. He protects the
childhood of the organizing will against the adult brutality of things. At his
side, Prometheus starts out for his conquest of the lightning—that is to say,
of the mind. The Greek refuses to have anything to do with the god of terrible
distances who kills the soul and the flesh through the hand of the priest. He
tears the fire from him. The god nails him down with pain, but he cries out in
revolt until Herakles comes to cut his bonds. By dint of willing it, man
creates his own liberty.

Thus
from the man to the god, from the real to the ideal, from acquired adaptions to
desired adaptions, the hero threads his path. The human mind, in a splendid
effort, rejoins the divine law. Polytheism organizes the primitive pantheism,
and, with admirable audacity, brings out the spirit of it, little thinking that
this flame, which Prometheus seized for a moment, will, when it tries to
escape, consume the world. The sensation of spiritual infiniteness that
Egyptian art gives, and of material infiniteness that Hindoo art gives, is not
to be found in the art that expresses the Hellenic soul. We find in this art an
accent of balanced harmony which it alone has, and which keeps within the
limits of our intelligence. But the intelligence cannot grasp the beginning and
the end of the melody with which it is cradled. All forms and all forces are bound
together in a deep solidarity; one passes into law, passes into divinity.
Doubtless, in the enormous universe of which the city is the definitive image,
there are antagonisms, there are action and reaction, but all partial conflicts
are effaced and melted in the intellectual order which man founds. Heraclitus
has just affirmed, together with the eternal flow of things, the identity of
contraries and their profound agreement in universal eurhythm.

It is
this, above all, that the old pediments of Olympia came to teach us.
Earthquakes have shaken them from their place, man has broken them and
dispersed their pieces, the overflow of the Alpheus has washed away their
violent polychromy. Even as they are, with terrible gaps, often without heads,
without torsos, almost always without limbs, held by iron supports, they remain
one, coherent and integral as when, at the foot of Kronion in Altis, they
towered over the forests peopled with statues. Inflamed with passion, drunk
with wine, the centaurs drag away the virgins. Fists and elbows strike; fingers
twist and loosen the grasp of other hands; knives kill, and the great bodies
sink under the ax, to the sound of the hammering hoofs, of sobs, and of
imprecations. The brute dies, but the fever burns in his loins and his savage
embrace tightens anew. Here everything is rude action, ardor of the new faith,
violence of the old myths which retold the tale of the abductions of the
primitive forests where all was menace, assault, and mysterious terror. Broad,
animated modeling and surfaces cut with great strokes carry out the mood of
struggle, of desire, of murder and death. And withal, a sovereign calm hovers
over the scene. One might call it a surging, roaring sea which none the less
forms an immense and tranquil harmony—because the wave is continuous, because
the same forces hollow it out, lift it up, and make it fall forever, to arise
forever.

Some
Dorian Aeschylus sculptured this great thing at the hour when the fusion of the
Apollonian soul and of Dionysian intoxication caused tragedy to well up from
the breast of orgiastic music, when a prodigious equilibrium maintained the
mystic agitation in the flame of the mind; and he felt within him the tremor of
an instinct of harmony which did not end with the horizon seen by his eyes. In
all the things he hears other things resound, distant echoes are born to swell
progressively and to die away little by little—there is in nature not a single
movement of which the germ and the repercussion cannot be traced in all
movements which manifest nature. In the sculpture of Olympia there is an
enchaining of causes and effects which has its perfect logic, but which is
still intoxicated with the discovery of itself. The mind of the artist prolongs
it unbroken so that he may gather up into himself its tumult and passion. One
moment more and Phidias transforms it into spiritual harmonies which mark the
expansion of the intelligence into the fullness of love.